Nerval's Lobster writes: "When a major IT company pays a reported $30 million—roughly 90 percent of it in cash—for an iOS app with no monetization strategy and a million downloads since launch, is that a sign that the tech industry as a whole is riding a massive, overinflated bubble? That’s the amount of filthy lucre that Yahoo paid for 17-year-old Nick D’Aloisio’s Summly app, according to AllThingsD. The app offers “algorithmically generated summaries” (in its Website’s words) from hundreds of news sources across the Web, presented in an easy-to-read format; users can cherry-pick their topics and news sources of choice, save summaries for offline viewing, and share content with others. Yahoo isn't alone, by a long shot: over the past couple years, a few apps have been snatched up for enormous sums—think Facebook’s $1 billion acquisition of Instagram in 2012, or Google buying Sparrow for a reported $25 million. Nor has the money train stopped there: in a pattern that recalls the late-90s market frothiness for anyone over the age of 28, a handful of tech companies have either launched much-hyped IPOs or witnessed their share price skyrocket into the stratosphere. But does all this IPO activity and app-acquiring actually mean "bubble"?"

This discussion was created for logged-in users only, but now has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.